Answer from the author
on
Project Arcade
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I do cover the legalities of ROMs and such in the book. I attempted to distinguish between the moral issue of using ROMs (short version: That's a personal decision for you to make) and the legal issue of using ROMs (that for the most part it involves a copyright violation). I mention the various clearly legal ways to get ROMs (the alas defunct StarRoms service for instance, compilations you can buy, etc), and the grey area (are you entitled to use a ROM if you own the board set, for instance).
One point I want to make though is that the book is not about building a MAME cabinet. You'll never hear me refer to one as a MAME cabinet. It's about building an arcade cabinet that runs various software which is an important distinction. Most people will run MAME, of course, however there are hundreds and hundreds of other software games that you can run legally that don't involved copyright violations. Digital Leisure games, Atari releases for the PC, shareware/freeware games that are replicas or similar to arcade games, retroremakes.com, Dance Dance Revolution, the open source dance pad game I can't recall the name of, Williams Classics if you can find it, etc. The two top games as far as my kids are concerned on the cabinet I built are Jazz Jackrabbit and a game called "Best Friends" (retro64.com).
At any rate, thanks for the review Craig and the comments everyone!
I'm the network mangler for a medium sized school system - 17 schools, 11,000 students, 3500 network nodes.
There are a few challenges that I can think of that deviate from what I encountered in the private sector:
1. Content filtering. Though you probably find content filtering of some sort at most companies, being in a school system I'm *required* to have content filtering by CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) or risk our federal funding and thereby my job. Unfortunately the extent of what/how you filter is ill-defined. Also unlike a company where as a rule sane adults realize they can get fired for surfing pornography, I have a few thousand middle and high school kids whose hormones are going nuts and often don't consider or care about the consequences. Now, I'm a bleeding heart liberal and censoring by and large goes against my grain, but I believe preventing young children from accidentally being exposed to something they weren't expecting (whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, for instance) is a good thing. However, if a pubescent child is determined to go looking I don't believe you can stop him from finding it. We could deploy draconian measures to stop it, but then you limit the value of the Internet (example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode). We (IT) also bounce all requests to block a site that isn't obvious pornography to the curriculum folks for a ruling. That leads to decisions I don't always agree with, such as blocking plannedparenthood.com among others. Content filtering in a K-12 school system is a touchy business, balancing needs/desires of kids, faculty, parents, school board, and CIPA.
2. Funding/staffing. I used to work for the Family Channel. When a new IT project was floated, an adequate budget was attached and off you went. In the school system new IT projects come up all the time, often driven from other departments, but insufficient funding/staffing is attached to it in many cases. Work tends to pile on already busy people and so you get people who are very good at what they do yet they end up doing a half-baked job because they simply can't get to it all. We have a networking staff of 3 people to handle all telecommunications/networking/security (cameras) in the county, and for the 6 years prior to this July, only had 2 on the team. This is probably the most frustrating part of my job. We also have to deal with bidding procedures. Anything over $10,000 has to be put out to bid and approved by the school board. That makes something we might normally do in a few days to a couple of weeks (evaluate and decide to purchase a product) take a month or more. You also end up justifying an IT decision to people who might not understand the nuances of why the lower bidder isn't the best solution.
3. Atmosphere. This is why I work for the school system. It's *so* much more relaxed and rewarding than working in the private sector. Work in the private sector and you're making money for someone. Work in a school system and you really can give something back to society. It may sound cheesy, and certainly isn't my only motivation, but it really feels good to use your talents somewhere where chasing money isn't the goal. When the kids go "it's the computer man!" and light up when you fix their computer it's a rewarding warm fuzzy. I also get to work in jeans and comfortable shirts, work 8 - 4:30, get 2 weeks off for Christmas, 1 week for spring break, 1 week for fall break, 10 vacation days a year, 9 or so sick days, 2 personal days, and all the standard school holidays. My boss is fine if I want to go grab an hour at my daughter's school to watch her school play. It's a really personal life/family friendly work atmosphere. Of course, there are downsides as well -- for instance I often have worked over spring break or Christmas break to do things while the faculty/kids are out, but that's not unique to the school system environment. Just didn't want to give the impression it was all wine and ro
StarROMs is a good start. 51 games at an average cost of $2.15 each if you buy them all is more than reasonable. If StarROMs proves commercially successful, you can reasonably hope that other ROMs from other vendors will become commercially available as well. Trashing StarROMs because of their limited selection is like slamming a baby learning to crawl because they aren't walking and running yet. Give it some time and see what happens. I know they are looking to expand their offerings but they have an uphill battle convincing copyright owners to let them.
Note that StarROMs isn't out to combat piracy. They're out to make money. That they convinced Atari that they could do so while combating piracy is what I hope other vendors take note of. If it takes off then it's likely that competitive forces will come into play similarly to what's happening in the MP3/digital-format-of-your-choice music industry today. Perhaps a competitor will open up shop with the pricing scheme you envision and the selection you want.
So I wouldn't call StarROMs a joke by any means -- I'd call it a good first step. I personally hope they make a killing so they can grow like crazy and offer more consumer choices...
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/
Project Arcade
http://www.projectarcade.com/
Speaking of NT @ Disney... Actual photos herein...
on
Tokyo.Disney.Net
·
· Score: 1
How timely - I was just at Disney World Florida in March, and lo and behold look at what I came across in the aquarium at Epcot?... I about laughed myself silly...
BSOD-1, and BSOD-2... Glad that wasn't running the monorail!
They are out of business, and have a few claims against them for non delivery. The owner seems to be a nice guy with good intentions but couldn't deliver the products...
The only shipping product I know of is the ArcadePC from Hanaho, which has gotten rave reviews.
Not much to add, but... Most folks who have done this have done it either with DOS or with MacOS (link to both), using ArcadeOS or built in Mac capabilities.
However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:
Slashdot Mirror
I do cover the legalities of ROMs and such in the book. I attempted to distinguish between the moral issue of using ROMs (short version: That's a personal decision for you to make) and the legal issue of using ROMs (that for the most part it involves a copyright violation). I mention the various clearly legal ways to get ROMs (the alas defunct StarRoms service for instance, compilations you can buy, etc), and the grey area (are you entitled to use a ROM if you own the board set, for instance).
One point I want to make though is that the book is not about building a MAME cabinet. You'll never hear me refer to one as a MAME cabinet. It's about building an arcade cabinet that runs various software which is an important distinction. Most people will run MAME, of course, however there are hundreds and hundreds of other software games that you can run legally that don't involved copyright violations. Digital Leisure games, Atari releases for the PC, shareware/freeware games that are replicas or similar to arcade games, retroremakes.com, Dance Dance Revolution, the open source dance pad game I can't recall the name of, Williams Classics if you can find it, etc. The two top games as far as my kids are concerned on the cabinet I built are Jazz Jackrabbit and a game called "Best Friends" (retro64.com).
At any rate, thanks for the review Craig and the comments everyone!
--- John St.Clair
Project Arcade
http://www.projectarcade.com/
Build Your Own Arcade Controls
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/
Actually, his cabinet is one of the ones I featured in the book :)
--- John St.Clair
Spring break and fall break are often not full weeks for us as administrative staff, so call it 5 weeks a year. So.... yeah, it's pretty nice :)
Did I mention during the summer we work 4 10-hour days (7 AM - 5 PM) and have 3 day weekends?
I'm the network mangler for a medium sized school system - 17 schools, 11,000 students, 3500 network nodes.
There are a few challenges that I can think of that deviate from what I encountered in the private sector:
1. Content filtering. Though you probably find content filtering of some sort at most companies, being in a school system I'm *required* to have content filtering by CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) or risk our federal funding and thereby my job. Unfortunately the extent of what/how you filter is ill-defined. Also unlike a company where as a rule sane adults realize they can get fired for surfing pornography, I have a few thousand middle and high school kids whose hormones are going nuts and often don't consider or care about the consequences. Now, I'm a bleeding heart liberal and censoring by and large goes against my grain, but I believe preventing young children from accidentally being exposed to something they weren't expecting (whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, for instance) is a good thing. However, if a pubescent child is determined to go looking I don't believe you can stop him from finding it. We could deploy draconian measures to stop it, but then you limit the value of the Internet (example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode). We (IT) also bounce all requests to block a site that isn't obvious pornography to the curriculum folks for a ruling. That leads to decisions I don't always agree with, such as blocking plannedparenthood.com among others. Content filtering in a K-12 school system is a touchy business, balancing needs/desires of kids, faculty, parents, school board, and CIPA.
2. Funding/staffing. I used to work for the Family Channel. When a new IT project was floated, an adequate budget was attached and off you went. In the school system new IT projects come up all the time, often driven from other departments, but insufficient funding/staffing is attached to it in many cases. Work tends to pile on already busy people and so you get people who are very good at what they do yet they end up doing a half-baked job because they simply can't get to it all. We have a networking staff of 3 people to handle all telecommunications/networking/security (cameras) in the county, and for the 6 years prior to this July, only had 2 on the team. This is probably the most frustrating part of my job. We also have to deal with bidding procedures. Anything over $10,000 has to be put out to bid and approved by the school board. That makes something we might normally do in a few days to a couple of weeks (evaluate and decide to purchase a product) take a month or more. You also end up justifying an IT decision to people who might not understand the nuances of why the lower bidder isn't the best solution.
3. Atmosphere. This is why I work for the school system. It's *so* much more relaxed and rewarding than working in the private sector. Work in the private sector and you're making money for someone. Work in a school system and you really can give something back to society. It may sound cheesy, and certainly isn't my only motivation, but it really feels good to use your talents somewhere where chasing money isn't the goal. When the kids go "it's the computer man!" and light up when you fix their computer it's a rewarding warm fuzzy. I also get to work in jeans and comfortable shirts, work 8 - 4:30, get 2 weeks off for Christmas, 1 week for spring break, 1 week for fall break, 10 vacation days a year, 9 or so sick days, 2 personal days, and all the standard school holidays. My boss is fine if I want to go grab an hour at my daughter's school to watch her school play. It's a really personal life/family friendly work atmosphere. Of course, there are downsides as well -- for instance I often have worked over spring break or Christmas break to do things while the faculty/kids are out, but that's not unique to the school system environment. Just didn't want to give the impression it was all wine and ro
They've actually lost titles from their catalog since they opened. They hope to add more but obtaining the rights is a bear I understand . . .
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/
StarROMs is a good start. 51 games at an average cost of $2.15 each if you buy them all is more than reasonable. If StarROMs proves commercially successful, you can reasonably hope that other ROMs from other vendors will become commercially available as well. Trashing StarROMs because of their limited selection is like slamming a baby learning to crawl because they aren't walking and running yet. Give it some time and see what happens. I know they are looking to expand their offerings but they have an uphill battle convincing copyright owners to let them. Note that StarROMs isn't out to combat piracy. They're out to make money. That they convinced Atari that they could do so while combating piracy is what I hope other vendors take note of. If it takes off then it's likely that competitive forces will come into play similarly to what's happening in the MP3/digital-format-of-your-choice music industry today. Perhaps a competitor will open up shop with the pricing scheme you envision and the selection you want. So I wouldn't call StarROMs a joke by any means -- I'd call it a good first step. I personally hope they make a killing so they can grow like crazy and offer more consumer choices... --- saint Build Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ http://www.arcadecontrols.com/ Project Arcade http://www.projectarcade.com/
BSOD-1, and BSOD-2 ... Glad that wasn't running the monorail!
The only shipping product I know of is the ArcadePC from Hanaho, which has gotten rave reviews.
However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:
Tomi Engdahl has several must-visit links - VGA to TV information center, VGA to RGB + composite sync -converter, and connecting Matrox MGA to TV among others that are probably worth visiting, and the Fixed Frequency Video FAQ is probably on the list as well. I would also definitely visit the TV and Monitor CRT (Picture Tube) Information by Samuel Goldwasser. This is getting kind of wordy, for more links hit the "Tech & tips" link on my web site and then the "monitors" link, and/or the "finishing" link and then again the "monitors" link. OH! Also you might contact Brian of PC2Jamma and who is also the author of ArcadeOS to see if some sort of port would be possible.
Hope that was of some use :)